Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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OOPs now has a Russian translation which updates shortly after the English pages are posted!
Older RU pages: https://acomics.ru/~OutOfPlacers
Now also in French:
And Ukranian:
Oh hey it’s the first time I’ve gotten here before everyone else. Was this posted late/early for the US?
Ran is my spirit animal right now. If it wasn’t for my bare-bones semblance of social awareness and reticence to make other people wallow in disgust, I’d be spouting the most weird and macabre things because they are just so fascinating to me. Like, I’m the kind of person who would have a conversation about sky burial over dinner if I didn’t know better.
Today I learned what a “sky burial” is.
Yeah no *actual* barbs, but you still don’t want zhis happening when one’s tongue contacts soft fleshy parts of zheir (or someone else’s) bodies. Nuh-uh, nope, and not advised to do so.
Currently wondering how correct Ran is on this, considering most animals that use blood flow to control protrusions like that have some sort of mechanism far more controllable than the inertia based one he just described. Wondering is simply putting the right muscle pressure into the tongue is enough…
I do appreciate his microscope though, and it appears that Kass is now a bit concerned with their own anatomy?
So let’s say the yinglet licks a mollusk larger that itself: Can the yinglet detach, or are they stuck to it until the mollusk eats them?
*thinks* It is razher like a Earzh pet called a Cat (Not a big fan, even on a holodeck) that has a barbed tongue (and ozher parts too) usually the flesh gets lacerated if it is unwilling to part from its shell. Zhis happens in zhings like Snails too, zhat really don’t want to be eaten, so it razher goes like a Humani eating an ice cream on Earzh, where some of zhe mollusk goes wizh each lick.
Keep in mind it is better if it all goes in our stomachs at once, as we don’t get Ice Cream headaches from eating clams <3 If you were imagining us stuck on a clam, like a silly yinglet licking a metal pole in zhe winter due to us being attached to zhe clam due to our tongues nature? If you see zhis, it is due to zhe clam having clamped down upon zhe Yinglet's tongue, starting a fight zhat de Yinglet will eventually win, unless kept under zhe water (Yings love clams, and get greedy), but likely if you see a Ying's tongue stuck to a clam, running around in a panic, zhat clam has clamped its shell on de offender's tongue almost certainly.
From the way it’s described here, the grab-sacks only exist while the yinglet is putting pressure on the tongue (via the rapid retraction Kass described in his journal entry). So, once the yinglet gives up on pulling the meat out, the tongue will relax and release it.
It would be funny if yinglets, in their lust for mollusk meat, simply never gave up and could not escape, monkey-trap style. But I’d imagine that, faced with a wall of mollusk meat, they’d just carve out manageable chunks with their shelltooth and eat those.
It probably rips all the bulbs off instead. Good thing yinglet saliva is a coagulant/antiseptic, right?
tfw you learn how the sausage is made
Zhe blood pressure is from zhe forward momentum and backwards acceleration. So it will subside fairly quickly no matter what. Zhe yinglet can pull very hard wizh a perfectly-timed flick backwards in that split-second window, but once zhe momentum runs out, zhe bulbs deflate back into zhe tongue. So licking a mollusk larger zhan yourself could jerk you towards zhe mollusk a bit, but zhe grip between tongue and mollusk would subside and zhe tongue zip back into your mouzh (yes, zhis reinflates zhe bulbs as zhe tongue retreats, but only after it is too far back to grab anyzhing) before you have a chance to panic over it.
To actually get stuck, zhe giant mollusk would need to be flying past quickly enough and close enough to zhe same mass as zhe yinglet to get pulled into a mutual spin – like bolas. Zhe weights of two creatures connected by a tongue and spinning around zheir shared centre of mass. Zhen zhe centrifugal force (or centripetal if we refuse to reconstruct accelerations in zhe non-inertial reference frame zhat zhe rotating system follows) keeps zhe bulbs inflated wizh blood. Making it impossible to let go. Climbing your own tongue decreases radius of gyration, making zhe system spin faster, and linearly increasing centrifugal (or centripetal) force. But zhis situation only happened to me once. In zhe moment, I panicked and ripped my tongue bulbs off. Took a week for them to fully grow back.
But looking back and analyzing, I see a few zhings I could do next time, if zhis ever happens to me again. One is wait to crash into somezhing and come to a stop – since zhat inevitably happened anyway. Zhe ozher is to climb my own tongue… zhen drop back to full tongue lengzh while relaxing my tongue – ze brief release of zhe mollusk and myself to tangential trajectories would alleviate centripetal force, letting zhe bulbs deflate and zhe tongue let go.
Or… I could just not catch foods I can’t handle.
Congratulations, now his tongue will feel gross forever!
Yeah, we got weird tongues. But don’t we all? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvBFLW1lS64
It is confirmed by science: yinglet tongues are also made of yinglet!
This comic keeps finding new and unique ways to deal psychological damage to Kass.
I wonder if Kass is going to experiment and squeeze his own tongue to see if that bristles the tip…
As long as de experiment involves clams, I don’t zhink Kass would mind.
Kass’ face did the ying thing!